Buffalo wrote:Gonna hopefully get a fair chunk of my xp contribution done tonight. I'm also debating doing the relevant songs on bass, but on hard. Gotta try and move up difficulties somehow.

I'm not sure if you're aware or not but RB3 introduced a setting called "No Fail Mode". It's something that I use all of the time and you don't have to worry about what difficulty you play on then.

Also you can instantly restart, so if you find hard is... hard on certain songs then you can pause, change difficulty (select restart too or you won't get scored if you continue from where you changed it). You can also select skip song from the pause menu which moves you on to the next song in the setlist.

You'll probably find you'll score as well with 3-4 stars on hard as you would do with 5 stars on medium.

But only play the game in ways you find it fun! Stick to whatever difficulty you feel happy with Rock Band has always been more about music than it has about being a game/high score chaser to me

I play it for the buzz of the music, to be honest. It's going to feel more like a...well, game if it's hard. Right now it almost feels a bit like I'm having a bit of a laugh playing air guitar and enjoying the music.

As September marches on, we bring two songs that have strong bass grooves while representing different ends of the musical spectrum.

Considered one of the biggest icons of funk, “Super Freak” represents one of Rick James’ finest musical achievements. One of Rolling Stone’s Greatest Songs of All Time, it spent ten weeks in the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. It also went on to top the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart and was nominated for the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. Guitar and bass hold down grooves through the song, with a standout bass part, playing a call-and-response with the synth. The vocal harmonies have a giant range throughout the song, which makes for some great, tough multiplayer gameplay.

Also releasing this week is “Float”, from Switchfoot’s latest album Where the Light Shines Through. Switchfoot has seen great success over their twenty year career, with 10 albums and two Grammy-nominations, including a win for 2011’s Hello Hurricane. While making Where the Light Shines Down, the band worked with producer John Fields, who produced several of their 00s-era albums (including their breakout hit The Beautiful Letdown). Where the Light Shines Through has gone on to hit the top 10 of the Billboard album chart. “Float” starts with a strong bassline over a relentless clapping beat that creates an infectious, feel-good vibe. Building into a slightly echo-y chorus punctuated with funky guitar, the song drops down a bit for the second verse and introduces a spacey synth riff going into the final chorus.

Songs can be purchased individually for £1.59 each. The Rock Band Rivals Season 2 Spotlight Pass can be purchased for £10.79.

Rick James - "Super Freak" (Part of the Rock Band Rivals Season 2 Spotlight Pass)

I thought you had been drinking for a moment then until I realised you wasn't talking about DLC but the Weekly Challenge. (The Rivals songs while DLC are free for everyone doing Rivals so they make a good substitute for the RB4 disc songs getting overused, I think this is the second or third time this has happened now.)

Rival's Challenge - Season 2: Week 5

Spotlights:

Muse - Hysteria (DLC, May 20th 2008. Rock Band 1's EU release week - Previously free for Rock Band exporters on previous gen, needs to be purchased on this gen)

A quick note on the Online Quickplay bug fix – often in development you can fix a bug only to find that there was another bug lurking behind it. That was the case with this setlist issue. The last update included some code that gave us better tools to examine the behavior and, through your plays (both successful and not), we were able to collect information that pointed at a different issue than what we originally thought. So, we’re confident that we’ve nipped this particular issue. We ask that you give Online Quickplay a shot and please confirm that it’s working for you. Also, know that we’re paying attention to all of the commentary and working hard to address the issues that you raise!

There's a variety of tier difficulties this week on bass, they seem to have picked songs that have standout sections for bass like solos and bass lines. I think they've actually done this for other instruments too but I haven't been playing enough to notice the past few weeks.

Superfreak is fun on guitar and bass and quite easy. A good one to try hard with.

Also I noticed that Hungry like the Wolf by Duran Duran was playable (I think that was from the RB2 disc so you should have that).

Both songs have quite nice spacing between notes so you're not going to be thrown a bunch of colours at once which will make it easier for finger placement.

I know the game has a "hyperspeed" setting which you can use to speed up the note highway (and so spreading out the notes) and maybe this will also let you slow the note highway down. I've never used this feature myself but it might be worth a look.